Shadow City Read Free Page A

The Blade looked worried, more than he had since Max’s disappearance. “What do you want me to see?” he asked finally.
    “You’d better come.” Niko turned and leaped down into the gully and back up the other side. He glided almost soundlessly.
    Alexander followed, feeling like a rhinoceros blundering through a china shop. He had spent the better part of a century in cities, and the quiet of the wilderness was hard to achieve.
    The covenstead spread over miles of mountains west of Missoula, Montana. At its heart was the Keep carved inside a mountain. In the river valley outside were a dozen long greenhouses, and on the peaks around perched cabins where members of the covenstead lived. Or they had, before the Guardian attacks almost two months ago. Now many of those homes were deserted, their occupants dead.
    Niko circled around to the other side of Horngate’s necklace of perimeter wards. East of the covenstead, they came to a tightly rucked blanket of ridges. The trees were thick here. Boulders and loose rock littered the crevices between the steep hillsides.
    They picked their way carefully over the broken landscape and down into a shadowy gorge. Alexander felt a surge of something the moment he set foot on the uneven bottom. The ground hummed with a low vibration that sent a dull ache up his legs. He glanced sharply at Niko. “What is this?”
    Niko shook his head. “Up ahead. You’ll see.”
    They wound through the piles of boulders and tangles of scrub juniper. The ground was dry, and the grass crackled beneath their feet. Above, the stars glittered like ice in the velvet night. The smell of Uncanny magic was suffocating, nearly drowning out the slighter scent of Divine magic.
    They came through a notch between two granite blocks, each the size of a Greyhound bus. On one side was a clearing. On the far side was a power circle. The outer ring was grayish powder—a mix of salt, herbs, metals, and whatever else witches used to create binding circles. It was a good six inches wide. Inside was another ring. It glowed a sullen red. Within was a fat column of oily black smoke perhaps twenty-five feet tall. It curled and twisted with violent motion.
    The hair on Alexander’s entire body prickled. He forced himself to walk closer.
    Tyler crouched on the hillside above, just outside Horngate’s perimeter wards. He was a slight man, with a dancer’s grace and an artist’s skill with a blade. He’d recently shorn his hair to a short bristle cut, but his minstrel mustache and goatee remained. He spun a knife in his fingers. As Niko and Alexander approached, he leaped down the scree to land softly on the balls of his feet, sliding the knife into a sheath strapped behind his neck.
    “What is this?” Alexander wondered aloud.
    “We were hoping you could tell us. We’ve never seen anything like it,” Tyler replied.
    At the sound of their voices, the smoke whirled and bulged, pressing against the invisible walls of the containment circle.
    “It lies in the path of the old perimeter wards,” Niko said, pointing to a charred circle on the ground. It ran straight through the center of the ring. “That can’t be coincidence.”
    “Have you told Giselle?”
    “Not yet.”
    So they came to him first. His lips tightened.
Damn them
. He was not their Prime. Alexander turned away from the writhing smoke. “You should do that. She will want to know.”
    The other two men exchanged a glowering look. “You know, I’m about ready to kick your ass,” Niko said.
    Alexander smiled. It felt stiff and wooden. Inside, his Blade licked its lips, hungry for blood. “Try.”
    “What is your problem? You claim you want a place here, but all you do is throw it in our faces. This is what Max wanted. You know it.”
    “Time for you to step up, son,” Tyler added in his laconic way, echoing Tutresiel’s earlier statement. His tone did nothing to hide the tension coiling through him. Alexander was not the only one spoiling for a